One
of the more significant marks of an authoritarian society is its willingness
to distort the truth while simultaneously suppressing dissent. For instance,
Umberto Eco argues that one element of proto-fascism is the rise of an
Orwellian version of Newspeak, or what he labels as the language of “eternal
fascism,” whose purpose is to produce “an impoverished vocabulary, and an
elementary syntax [whose consequence is] to limit the instruments for
complex and critical reasoning.” [1] Under the Bush
administration, especially since the horrible events of September 11th, we
have witnessed an extension of the concept of war to include not only
traditional, strategic, defense-oriented objectives, but also to discipline
civil society, reproduce all aspects of public life in the image of official
power, and inject the ideology of militarism as the very foundation of
politics. Accompanying this increasing form of discursive and material
repression is an attempt to refashion the tools of language, sound, and
image in an effort to diminish the capacity of the American public to think
critically. As the critical power of language is reduced in official
discourse to the simulacra of communication, it becomes more difficult for
the American public to engage in critical debates, translate private
considerations into public concerns, and recognize the distortions and lies
that underlie much of the current government policies. What happens to
critical language under the emergence of official Newspeak can be seen in
the various ways in which the Bush administration and its official
supporters both misrepresent by mis-naming government policies and simply
engage in lying to cover up their own regressive politics and policies.
[2]

Many people have pointed to
Bush himself as a mangler of the English language, but this charge simply
repeats the obvious while privatizing a much more important issue connecting
language to power. Bush’s discursive ineptness may be fodder for late night
comics, but such analyses miss the more strategic issue of how the Bush
administration actually manipulates discourse. For instance, Bush describes
himself as a “reformer” while he promotes policies that expand corporate
welfare, give tax benefits to the rich, and “erode the financial capacity of
the state to undertake any but the most minimal welfare functions.”
[3] He defines himself as a “compassionate conservative,”
but he implements policies that result in “billions of dollars in
cuts...proposed for food stamp and child nutrition programs, and for health
care for the poor.” [4] Bush’s public speeches, often
mimicked in the media, are filled with what Renana Brooks has called “empty
language,” that is, statements that are so abstract as to be relatively
meaningless, except to reinforce in simplistic terms an often reactionary
ideological position. Brooks cites the example of Bush’s comment on the
complex relationship between malpractice suits and skyrocketing health care,
which he reduces to “No one has ever been healed by a frivolous lawsuit.”
[5] While Bush’s own ideological position becomes clear in
this comment, the complexity of the issue is completely trivialized and
removed from public discussion. Sometimes the distortions of official
language are hard to miss, even among the media guards so quick to invoke
patriotic correctness. One glaring example happened in an interview between
Terry Gross, host of National Public Radio’s, Fresh Air, and Grover Norquist,
president of Americans for Tax Reform, also considered to be the chief
architect of President Bush’s tax plan. The topic for discussion was the
estate tax, reviled as the “death tax” by conservative elites to gain
popular support for its repeal, though the vast majority of Americans will
not be affected by this tax. Gross suggested that since the estate tax only
effects a small minority of people who get over $2 million in inheritance,
the law eliminating it clearly privileges the rich, not the average
American. Norquist responded by arguing that the morality behind her
argument was comparable to the same type of morality that resulted in the
death of millions of Jews under the Holocaust. When Gross challenged this
specious analogy, Norquist argued illogically that people (read liberals)
who attacked the estate tax could now be placed on the same moral plane as
the Nazis who killed over six million Jews, and untold others.
[6] Under this logic, any critique of a minority group, but especially
the rich, can be dismissed as being comparable to the kind of discrimination
waged by the perpetrators of one of the worse mass murders in human history.
Of course, there is the further implication that liberal critics should also
be punished for these views just as the Nazis were punished in Nuremberg for
their crimes against humanity. This is not just a matter of using a
desperate logic to dismiss counter-arguments, or of silencing one’s critics
through distortion, but actually demonizing those who hold the “wrong”
views. Norquist’s position is a contortion that fails to hide the
fundamentalism that often drives this type of language.

Official Newspeak also
trades in the rhetoric of fear in order to manipulate the public into state
of servile political dependency and unquestioning ideological support. Fear
and its attendant use of moral panics create not only a rhetorical umbrella
to promote other agendas, but also a sense of helplessness and cynicism
throughout the body politic. Hence, Bush’s increased dependency upon issuing
terror and security alerts and panic-inducing references to 9/11 is almost
always framed in Manichean language of absolute good and evil. Bush’s
doublespeak also employs the discourse of evangelicalism, and its attendant
suggestion that whatever wisdom Bush has results from his direct communion
with God--a position not unlike that of Moses on Mount Sinai, and which, of
course, cannot be challenged by mere mortals. [7]

While all governments
sometimes resort to misrepresentations and lies, Bush’s doublespeak makes
such action central to its maintenance of political power and its
manipulation of the media and the public. Language is used in this context
to say one thing, but to actually mean its opposite. [8]
This type of discourse mimics George Orwell’s dystopian world of 1984 where
the Ministry of Truth actually produces lies and the Ministry of Love is
actually used to torture people. Ruth Rosen points out that the Bush
administration engages in a kind of doublespeak right out of Orwell’s novel.
For instance, Bush’s Healthy Forest Initiative “allows increased logging of
protected wilderness. The ‘Clear Skies’ initiative permits greater
industrial air pollution.” [9] With respect to the latter,
the Bush administration has produced Spanish-language public service
commercials hawking “Clear Skies” legislation, using ads that claim such
legislation promotes “cleaner air,” when in fact it has weakened
restrictions on corporate polluters and eased regulations on some toxic
emissions such as mercury. In fact, J.P. Suarez, the Environmental
Protection Agency’s chief of enforcement, recently notified his staff that
“the agency would stop pursuing Clean Air Act enforcement cases against coal
burning power plants.” [10] Eric Pianin reported in The
Washington Post that “The Bush administration has decided to allow thousands
of the nation’s dirtiest coal-fired power plants and refineries to upgrade
their facilities without installing costly anti-pollution equipment as they
now must do.” [11] In addition, the Bush administration
has weakened federal programs for cleaning up dirty waters and has removed
scientific studies offering evidence of global warming from government
reports. [12]

Even when it comes to
children, Bush is undaunted in his use of deceptive language. In arguing for
legislation that would shift financial responsibility to the states for the
highly successful Head Start program, which provides over 1 million poor
children with early educational, health and nutrition services, Bush
employed the phrase “opt in” to encourage Congress to pass new legislation
reforming Head Start. While “opt in” sounds as if it refers to expanding the
program, it actually undermines it because the states that are facing
crushing deficits do not have the money to fund the programs. Thus, the
legislation would drastically weaken Head Start. Such language calls to mind
the Orwellian logic that “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is
strength.” Not surprisingly, the Bush administration has just announced that
it will cut funding for Head Start programs in the next budget.

There is also the now
obvious ways in which the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to
legitimate his claim for a pre-emptive war with Iraq. The list of
misrepresentations and rhetorical contortions includes the claims that Iraq
was building nuclear weapons, was engaged in the production of biological
and chemical agents, and that Saddam Hussein was working with Osama bin
Laden and had direct ties to Al Qaeda. [13] Even after
the CIA reported that the charge that Saddam Hussein had bought uranium from
the African country of Niger in pursuit of developing a nuclear weapon was
fabricated, Bush included the assertion in his 2003 State of the Union
Address. [14] And, of course, Dick Cheney seems
relentless in repeating these lies in practically every speech and
interview, even when they are rebuked by the high ranking intelligence
services, who cannot credibly support such misrepresentations any longer.

Charges of Newspeak do not
come exclusively from the left or from cantankerous critics. New York Times
op-ed writer and economist, Paul Krugman, asserts that “misrepresentation
and deception are standard operating procedure for [the Bush]
administration, which–to an extent never before seen in U.S.
history–systematically and brazenly distorts the facts.” And, in referring
to Bush’s record on the selling of the Iraqi war, he argues that it “is
arguably the worst scandal in American political history–worse than
Watergate, worse than Iran-contra. Indeed, the idea that we were deceived
into war makes many commentators so uncomfortable that they refuse to admit
the possibility.” [15]

In what has to rank as
either one of the most egregious distortions (or maybe just delusional
ravings as the New York Daily News suggests) [16] that
has emerged from the Bush administration, President Bush in an interview
with New Yorker reporter Ken Auletta claimed that “No president has ever
done more for human rights than I have.” [17] Such a
statement is extraordinary given that Amnesty International condemned the
United States in 2002 for being one of the world leaders in human rights
violations. Similarly a number of organizations such as Human Rights Watch,
U.S. Human Rights Network, the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights,
and Amnesty International have accused the Bush administration itself of
engaging in various human rights violations, including preventing foreign
nationals held as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay from gaining access to US
courts, executing juvenile offenders, engaging in racial profiling,
detention, inhumane treatment, and deportation of Muslim immigrants after
September 11, 2001, and the refusing to ratify the American convention on
Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and
numerous other international agreements aimed at protecting human rights.

Official Newspeak points to
not only questions regarding the abuse of power, it also raises questions
about what kind of cultural politics is necessary to expose such myths and
defeat what Edward Said has called “the imposed silence and normalized quiet
of unseen power wherever and whenever possible.” [18]
This is both a political and pedagogical task that demands that
intellectuals and others speak out, break through the haze of official
discourse and memory, and take seriously a cultural politics that connects
critical knowledge and understanding with the possibility of social
engagement and transformation. At the very least, this suggests recognizing
the many sites of pedagogy (from the Internet to alternative magazines) in
which ideology can be challenged and rearticulated in the interest of
transforming the conditions that impose both silence and human suffering. It
means connecting the sites in which we work, whether in higher education,
the arts, journalism, the media, or other dominant and alternative public
spheres with those individuals, groups, and issues that make up everyday
life. At stake here is the need to reconnect matters of theory and practice,
critical understanding and civic engagement, and to do so from the
recognition that we need to reach as many people as possible. Regardless the
ideological oversights and theoretical sloppiness that marks Michael Moore’s
work, he should be studied as a model for redefining public pedagogy as
crucial tool for political engagement. Similarly, progressives and others
need to become attentive to matters of audience and language, reaching out
to young people and others who tend to be marginalized in the official
languages of dominant power and unfortunately in the language of many
progressives. Making the political more pedagogical means that progressives
and others need to be attentive to how people connect intellectually and
affectively to language, political issues, and values that shape their
lives. This is no small matter because consciousness is the ground on which
agency is developed and political action even becomes understandable. At the
present moment, The F.B.I. is mounting a campaign to silence individuals
planning to protest at the upcoming Republican Presidential Convention. This
signals not only the crude way in which authoritarianism works, it also
signals the power of critical discourse and its possibilities for disrupting
ideologies and material relations of power. We need to both condemn such
acts of government repression while at the same time expanding the
conditions that make them necessary for those who hold power. Critical
consciousness, autonomy, the ability to make power visible, to become aware
of alternative histories and communities of struggle is the stuff of not
simply political awareness but of what makes politics possible in the first
place.

1. Umberto Eco, “Eternal
Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt,” The New York Review of
Books (November-December 1995), p. 15.
2. Paul O’Neill, former Treasury Secretary who served in the Bush
administration for two years, claimed on the January 11, 2004 television
program 60 Minutes that Bush and his advisors started talking about invading
Iraq 10 days after the inauguration, eight months before the tragic events
of September 11th. See CBS News, “Bush
Sought Way to Invade Iraq,” 60 Minutes Transcript (July 11th, 2004). For
a chronicle of lies coming out of the Bush administration, see David Corn,
The Lies of George Bush (New York: Crown, 2003).
3. Abbott Gleason, “The
Hard Road to Fascism,” Boston Review (Summer 2003).
4. Bob Herbert, “Casualties at Home,” New York Times (March 27, 2003), p.
A27.
5. Renana Brooks, “The
Language of Power, Fear, and Emptiness,” The Nation (June 24, 2003).
6. The relevant excerpt from this interview can be found in Platform
Section, “Millions and Millions Lost,” Harper’s Magazine (January 2004), p.
16
7. This insight comes from Juan Stam, “Bush’s Religious Language,” The
Nation (December 22, 2003), p. 27.
8. Bush’s use of doublespeak is so pronounced that the National Council of
Teachers of English awarded him its 2003 Doublespeak Award. See,
www.govst.edu/users/ghrank/Introduction/bush2003.htm.
9. Ruth Rosen, “Bush
Doublespeak,” San Francisco Chronicle (July 14, 2003). In January 2004,
former Vice President Al Gore in a major speech on Bush’s environmental
policies said “Indeed, they often use Orwellian language to disguise their
true purposes. For example, a policy that opens national forests to
destructive logging of old-growth trees is labeled Healthy Forest
Initiative. A policy that vastly increases the amount of pollution that can
be dumped into the air is called the Clear Skies Initiative.” Gore cited in
Bob Herbert, “Masters of Deception,” The New York Times (January 16, 2004),
p. A21.
10. Jennifer Lee, “U.S. Proposes Easing Rules on Emissions of Mercury,” The
New York Times (December 3, 2003), p. A20.
11. Eric Pianin, “Clean
Air Rules to Be Relaxed,” The Washington Post (August 23, 2003).
12. The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency
actually eliminated references to any studies that “concluded that warming
is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tail
pipe emissions and could threaten health and ecosystems.” Cited in Huck
Gutman, “On
Science, War, and the Prevalence of Lies,” The Statesman (June 28,
2003).
13. For all of the direct government sources for these lies, see
One
Thousand Reasons to Dump George Bush, especially the section titled
“Honesty.” Also see, David Corn, The Lies of George W. Bush (New
York: Crown Publishers, 2003).
14. See David Corn, Ibid., The Lies of George W. Bush, pp. 228-230.
15. Both quotes can be found in Paul Krugman, “Standard Operating
Procedure,” The New York Times (June 3, 2004). P. A17.
16. See Lloyd Grove, “Lowdown,”
New York Daily News (January 11, 2004).
17. Cited in Paul Krugman, “Going for Broke,” The New York Times (January
20, 2004), p. A21.
18. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 135.